Apple fans are eagerly anticipating Wednesday's Mac-centric company announcement, particularly since a few snaps of what are claimed to be internals of a prototype 13.3in MacBook Air popped up online this weekend.
The snap, posted by Engadget, shows motherboard, four separate batteries, a bank of Flash chips - presumably the …

COMMENTS

Unidentified Port

nope...

I don't get it. It's all just marketing BS. The reality is if you take a laptop, nobody cares how thin it is. Light and approximate size a little but really... what's the difference between my 13.3 macbook pro and a 'air' that is a quarter of the thickness? My MCP has more functionality. They sell this thin stuff just because it looks clever but in the real world you carry a laptop...

Re: nope...

Thin is good because it makes the machine lighter.

Lots of people are willing to trade performance for portability, me among them. I don't want to lug a 13.3in MacBook Pro around shows all day when I can be much more comfortable with a 13.3in MacBook Air, a machine that handles with aplomb all the word processing and lightweight image editing that I throw at it.

He's got a point

Weights

In the current generation, the Air is 1.36 kg, the 13.3" MacBook Pro is 2.04kg. So the latter is 50% heavier. I guess it may actually work the other way to that which Tony Smith suggests: if you've stripped out all the weight then what you're left with is smaller, so you can shrink the case. If you keep the screen the same size, that obviously means reducing the depth.

That's if you're brutally functional about it. In reality, most electrical gadgets sell better if you can generate an emotional bond between the purchaser and the device. Hence why adverts nowadays are full of words like 'experience'. It's still essentially a trade-off with the one design aspect being played against the others, but making devices better looking helps to improve sales. Apple are just one of the companies that understands this and definitely didn't discover it.

it's a prototype?

I'll take a guess or two

Based on the observation that the middle two are offset I'm going to go with they split them up for a better centre of gravity, or as a long shot, can be configured with a SSD drive instead of a battery if you need more storage than the 64GB(?) on the motherboard.

Perhaps

Perhaps the juice being pumped out by one single battery isn't enough to power the laptop, so throw in 3 more batteries (for weight distribution as mentioned earlier), to up the total juice output capacity. Perhaps having 4 smaller, less output, batteries is cheaper than 1 large output battery too? At the very least, perhaps they're trying to avoid a flaming laptop a-la-Dell by distributing potental flares across 4 batteries...